It would be generous to say that a lot of people don’t like the $110 million expansion with its pointy ends and slanted exhibition walls. Libeskind is revered, but this isn’t widely considered one of his masterpieces. The building can feel distant, illogical and inconvenient.

So, it’s not all that surprising that this time around, when it comes to constructing a new administration building, DAM isn’t asking for any input from the general public or playing up the addition of a new piece of architecture in the Museum District. The museum announced the building officially Thursday with ground set to break any day now. The design is complete. Done, hope you like it.

The good news is that there is plenty to like. DAM went local this time, employing Roth Sheppard Architects, one of the city’s most respected firms and quite possibly its most creative. The two-story building will have an interesting glass-walled ground floor, with the glass layered in a way that mimics curtain folds. It’s a nice touch that should add some interest to people passing by.

The $11.5 million, 50,000-square-foot building could be good for the neighborhood as well, filling in an awkwardly placed parking lot and adding 100 museum employees to the scene. Currently, DAM’s administrative offices are five blocks away at 14th and Tremont streets.

The building, which fronts on Bannock Street, near 13th Avenue, will hold DAM’s research library and 9,000-square feet of collection storage, freeing space inside its existing North Building for exhibitions. Renderings on the website of Saunders Construction show an airy interior with an atrium and more glass walling off different areas.

The new building won’t be open to the public, but it sits on an important site, next to the Hamilton Building and behind the Clyfford Still Museum. It’s just a stone’s throw from two of the city’s most important structures, the Denver Public Library, designed by Michael Graves, and DAM’s own North Building, by Gio Ponti.

The Still, designed by architect Brad Cloepfil, won international accolades when it opened in November of 2011, so people are clearly watching what goes up next door.

In a rendering, the new square, squat office building looks a like a younger sibling to the low-rise Still, which is also right-angled with glass at the ground level in front. It appears to ignore the Hamilton Building ideas altogether, taking the same tact Cloepfil did in designing the Still.

DAM makes clear in its media release that the new building is going up without public money, though that might be semantics. DAM gets more than $5 million a year from the taxes collected through the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, plus other subsidies and good-faith donations, so sorting out which parts of its spending come from public or private money is really a matter of accounting.

Technically, DAM in a nonprofit entity and it can build whatever it wants without asking the public what it thinks. It owns the land, so any ideas about how significant the building site might be or what should go there aren’t officially in the public domain.

DAM can include its constituents in the decision-making or shut them out.
But it does appear to represent a different way of doing business than the last time around.

Is that “light and airy” interior stair image at the Saunder’s site actually code-legal, let alone safe, or is it yet another rendering that has airbrushed the inconvenient details of making things actually work in the real world?

The Liebskind atrium staircase, BTW, is not safe, with it’s fun but irregular and non-rectilinear design; and insufficient visual cues for orientation; and too many disorienting visual cues.

Great architects give us great form that is safe and functional. And it warrants noting: it was not the open process that made Liebskind’s design so dysfunctional. He himself chose to push the envelope there. And did he ever succeed.

Deane

Gerry, relax – it’s a rendering. I’m sure the good people at Saunders will make it code-legal, unless you think they’re only going to allow semi-transparent staff to use it.

Alistair Rowe

Thank God Daniel Libeskind was not involved this time around. I am still repelled by his crass addition. Will we ever have the balls to tear down his unusable, clumsy eyesore?